Category Archives for Games

Those who have the privilege of owning a Virtual Reality (VR) headset I’m sure has shown VR to someone who hasn’t experienced it before, I like to tag these people as VR first timers (jokes), I don’t actually like labelling things but for the sake of this post I will use it. Anyway back to the subject at hand.

I own a HTC Vive and it’s currently set up in my spare bedroom at home, I feel very privileged to own this hardware and to actually have a PC that runs it. I take advantage of this by allowing anyone to have a go on my VR rig.

Most of my family and friends have never heard of VR, they aren’t exactly geeky tech heads like myself, one of my friends thought it was some weird spy camera rig set up, having described that it’s the next big thing called Virtual Reality, my friend still didn’t get it and just brushed it off, I even had to plea with him just to give it a go, I was begging him to try it to see…I had a similar experience with my girlfriend as well.

I have demoed VR to a lot of people at various technology conferences, typically at a Unity booth at a conference we would have some form of VR demo set up, whether it’s an Oculus VR, HTC Vive or GearVR. The advantage at a technology conference is I don’t have to beg people to try it.

What’s the different between the three? Quite drastic in my opinion and this question is relevant to the topic of this post because you need to think about what type of VR experience you would like to show to a VR first timer. I don’t want to delve into this question too much though but in simple terms Oculus is a sitting or standing VR experience connected to a PC, GearVR is a mobile experience, a device that has a slot to place your Samsung device into and the HTC Vive (saving the best ’till last) which is a room-scale VR headset connected to a PC (can also be a standing or sitting experience).

GearVR has probably been the most accessible VR experience available on the market at present, given there’s some hundreds of millions of Samsung devices in the hands of consumers that are VR ready puts Oculus and Samsung in very powerful position, I personally believe in using the highest quality experience for showing VR to newbies, so that leaves Oculus and HTC Vive. In my experience demoing a mobile level quality VR demo to VR first timers hasn’t delivered the same experiences as other VR headsets, I would love to hear if someone has seen the opposite experience so please comment on this post below.

Let’s start with Oculus, Oculus delivers a higher level immersion, from my experience demoing to consumers, reactions to the Oculus have been along the lines of higher quality graphics, better immersion, this is partly due to the technology which in turn allows developers to push the barriers of immersive experiences. Considering Oculus runs off a high-end PC and not a mobile device (same for the HTC Vive). I’m not saying GearVR apps can not create high levels of immersive experiences…Immersion is not defined by graphics quality and or technology but it can help.

Moving on to the HTC Vive, In my opinion and from my experience demoing to VR first timers and talking to professional developers, the HTC Vive delivers the best VR experience on the market. Partly due to the room-scale features it offers, this is a complete game changer in a VR experience, being able to physically move around the virtual room or space you are experiencing is extremely powerful and is a superb feature for us developers to experiment with with new game designs.

What’s really strange is the ability to move around a virtual room seems to confuse consumers at first, almost every VR first timer who tried the HTC Vive didn’t think about walking around the room, it seems to come across as an unnatural thing to do, which is true, think about it; Almost all core gaming experiences are static, since the beginning of video games you have never had the opportunity to physically move around a virtual space to effect the gameplay, the Wii was really the first global success in doing physical movement to effect gameplay (is there a term for that?) but you were limited as you had to face towards the TV.

Content on the HTC Vive has introduced various input designs that allow you to traverse virtual environments in various ways, there has been a few talks on this and is a constant topic at present, many developers experimenting with new ideas and also defining input standards within VR. Teleportation is one common technique which doesn’t really work for all experiences, the ability to teleport already defines the genre of your game, I mean..surely your game has some sci-fi based advancements right? As teleportation is not a natural experience for a human, the power of teleportation can break the immersive experience you are having within the content. In a general positive VR empowers you to experience what a teleportation might feel like, in reality it’s a win win situation for a consumer.

From a VR first timer perspective the teleportation technique completely freaks people out at first, I tend to show VR first timers Valve’s demo called “Aperture Robot Repair” which has a cool teleportation implementation, but it takes a few times to get used it at first, especially amusing is when the first time they use it and mess it up by teleporting up against a wall it strikes shock. Other implementations involve various techniques which I won’t go into in this post.

My brother tried a VR experience which placed the player up on a high beam, this totally freaked him out, having a fear of heights didn’t help but for my amusement seeing him try and balance himself on a flat surface (i.e. the bedroom floor) was rather good.

So, moving on from this, I would highly recommend showing VR first timers the HTC Vive, it really delivers the best experience VR can currently offer, the room-scale capabilities enhance the experience tenfold.

A cinematic experience which introduces VR first timers to room-scale VR with no interaction required, limiting the senses and allows us to adapt to the virtual environment and power of room-scale VR. Everyone I have shown this to has been blown away by this experience, especially when a big whale swims by. Generally people are super convinced at this point.

Adding an extra layer into the room-scale VR experience with the ability to be able to interact with objects in a virtual room, the human senses are going a bit more crazy with this experience, usually receive a lot of nervous laughter and “whoa!!” outbursts. Introduces teleportation input technique, which freaks people out at first. Generally; feedback has been very positive with this experience.

An artistic VR experience, empowering the user to be creative with painting and drawing in VR, user can move around and interact via painting strokes or objects into a virtual space. Usually at this point a majority of users have adapted to a VR room-scale experience and everything is starting to feel more natural. As far as I know there’s no teleportation technique implemented.

After they are done with these three experiences, I offer a choice of content next, this means they can pick something that might interest them or pick something that might enhance a human emotion such as fear as in horror or fear of heights, so here is my list in no particular order:

Job Simulator

The Rose and I

Fantastic Contraption

Space Pirate Trainer

AudioShield

The Brookhaven Experiment

CloudLands: VR Minigolf

Skeet: VR Target Shooting

Selfie Tennis

The Lab

I acknowledge content and peoples interests plays a big part in personal VR experiences and notice I mentioned “personal”, from what I’ve seen everyone’s VR experience is unique and personal, people react to different experiences differently, it can effect them emotionally, such as being excited, nervous, funny, scared, peaceful etc…it would be great to hear what content you like to show to VR first timers and also the reactions from these experiences you’ve seen, please comment below.

So what have I learn’t exactly, lets summarise:

Demo the best technology on the market i.e. HTC Vive with room-scale VR

Ask the individual if they have any fears before letting them play

Always ensure the player doesn’t step on the headset cable

Start with the most basic / limited experience for example theBlu which is awesome

Notice I haven’t covered nausea in this post, content on the HTC Vive and the technology shouldn’t cause this but may be experienced with specific people, I haven’t had one person experience nausea with the HTC Vive but I’m sure someone out there has.

Web deployment with Unity has took a hit in recent months due to the deprecation of NPAPI plugins in Chrome, which mean’t the WebPlayer plugin has been disabled. All major browser vendors are moving away from plugins.

Current solution is to look at the WebGL build target which came in a Preview state with Unity’s 5.0 release. We know there’s some challenges with supporting WebGL right now, but let me detail what the future should look like.

Why Preview?

WebGL now, is in Preview, it’s a way of Unity saying that some functionality and development needs to happen before they consider it a fully released product. Missing functionality from Unity’s side includes:

WebAssembly which allows for taking ASM.js and turning it into byte code, in turn this makes things faster as byte code is faster to parse than JavaScript as well as being faster to execute. This will solve slow load times and slow downloads, also fixing up some memory usage issues.

Data Compression; Slightly self-explanatory, will allow for data to be kept in a compressed format in memory. Currently you need to handle this yourself, but not for much longer. This will greatly help with build sizes.

Shared Array Buffers is a feature that will allow for memory to be shared across web workers, using this Unity can map their current multi-threaded code to JavaScript, so WebGL can benefit from multi-threaded features such as PhysX. No more colliding on the main thread!

WebGL 2.0 – WebGL to become a graphic powerhouse, no really it can. Currently WebGL is using OpenGLES 2.0, remember those good old smartphones?! With WebGL 2.0 Unity WebGL gets the much needed bump up to OpenGLES 3.0, allowing for Unity to lift it’s restrictions on shaders, so we can have image effects (all the bloom you need), deferred rendering, skinning on the GPU. Unity’s 5.2 release included support for WebGL 2.0 as an experimental option, reason; because no major browser vendor has shipped support for it yet as of the date of this post, but you can try with a Firefox nightly build.

Some WebGL tips ‘n’ tricks:

Need to ship projects now with WebGL? Be sure to have taken note of what features in Unity that isn’t supported right now (see above) and also make use of these:

Crunched Texture Compression

You can use this feature as a texture format for JPEG like compression ratio and quality, however unlike JPEG it will directly decompress into DXT, so you have compressed textures on the GPU, no loss in GPU memory, happy days! This feature helps with memory reduction and keeping the data size down.

AssetBundles

A must use for any Unity project really, but for WebGL it will greatly help with a reduction in memory and build size. Let’s reduce everything!

Unity Profiler

If you’re not making use of Unity’s Profiler then you’re doing it wrong, as with any Unity project profile away, it’s fun and a great way of finding your bottlenecks. You should be optimising for WebGL as you do for any other platform in Unity, there’s a lot of resources online for optimising.

WebGL Memory Size

Within Unity -> Player Settings -> Publishing Settings you can specify how much memory (in MB) the content should allocate for it’s heap. If it’s too low you will get out of memory errors, but if it’s too high your content might fail to load in some browsers or on some machines, because the browser might not have enough available memory to allocate the requested heap size. Test and find the correct solution for your app. Optimising your app as much as possible will help with memory reduction therefore the need for a high heap size decreases..

Multiplayer Gaming

Use UNET in 5.1+ as this will work out of the box as it’s using the WebSocket API – you can also write JavaScript code to directly use WebSockets yourself.

Unity 5 has implemented a HUGE update on the rendering / graphics side of the engine, introducing new lighting workflows with realtime GI, a Physically Correct Shader (Metallic & Specular workflows supported) among many other things..

I wanted to do an experiment today, where I test out HDR Skybox’s in Unity 5 to see how drastically the lighting and mood of a scene can change.

HDR:

High-Dynamic-Range is an imaging photography technique to produce a higher dynamic range of brightness. This is achieved by capturing different exposures of your chosen subject matter and combining them into one image.

In Unity we can use these HDR images to help blend 3D models into the environment, this can drastically add to the belief that the 3D model is actually in the environment.

I’ll be showing how these 3 HDR images help create a completely different feel and look to the scene:

I have daytime, evening and night-time HDR’s, they should all create drastically different lighting conditions in Unity.

Time’s up chumps..let’s do this:

Unity 5’s new standard shader has built-in support for image based lighting (IBL), this really helps with the belief that the 3D model is in the environment I am setting with the HDR skybox.

Here’s the model with just Unity 5’s current default procedural skybox:

With a bit of trickery (not really, just pushing a few buttons in Unity), let’s now see what happens when I add the daytime HDR Skybox:

I haven’t messed with any lights at all, all I have is the default Directional Light in the scene with default settings. looks rather impressive after just adding a new HDR Skybox to the scene.

Let’s try the evening HDR Skybox now:

Awesome, I am really enjoying playing around with this, I love how quickly I can completely change the lighting conditions which in turn drastically changes the mood and atmosphere in the scene. I can’t wait to see how games are going to utilize these new features.

Okay, last one, the night-time HDR Skybox, I’m a little skeptical about this one, I’ve no idea how this will look and I imagine it’s not really desirable to use a night-time HDR image. Anyway, let’s see what it looks like:

Actually turned out rather well, the image doesn’t show the white spots on the model as much as in the editor, these white spots are produced by the specular smoothness on the Standard Shader, i.e the more smooth I make it the more white spot artifacts are produced, not sure why this is more present in the night-time scene, I’m sure there’s a setting I’ve missed or something..

Overall, I’m really impressed with this, especially how quickly I can change the mood and lighting of the scene and the visual output from Unity 5’s new rendering / graphics update.

My job is based on supporting Unity’s customer base in the EMEA region, to do a good job that means I need to learn all of the Unity things, features and new services, at least on a high level.

I tend to experiment a lot with Unity’s new features, today I wanted to share with you some of my R&D with Unity 5’s new Graphics overhall, this includes the new Physical Based Shader, Realtime Global Illumination and the new Scene Render Settings.

My experiments are usually aimed at producing a small scaled demo that can squeeze in as many features as possible, this enables me to demonstrate these features easily to customers while in the field.

PBS (Physically Based Shader):

Unity’s new Physically Based Shader a.k.a one shader to rule them all a.k.a standard shader (actual name) allows us to create materials for a wide range of natural surfaces such as Metals, Dielectrics (non-metals): monolithic materials = rock, water, plastic ceramic, wood, glass etc..cloth and organic.

The new PBS also plays nice with IBL (Image Based Lighting), we can setup a skybox cubemap in the new Scene Render Settings to help with really blending our objects into the surrounding environments:

One demo (not developed by me) shows a nice range of different surfaces used by the new standard shader in Unity 5:

We can see there’s at least six different surfaces represented here with the usage of just one shader – Ceramic, Cloth, Metal, Glass, Rock and Wood. The Scene Render Settings really help blending the Doll model into the surrounding area, helping us believe that the Doll is in the Forest environment.

The new shader includes many different texture slots, allowing you to add really nice detail to models. The shader includes a multi-variation of smaller shaders with versions for mobile and high-end.

Our built-in shader code is always available for download and currently with Unity 5 this will include the new standard shader as well – Could change but I doubt it.

Geometry needs to be marked lightmap static but you can relight geometry using Light Probes that are updated in realtime with the GI generated from the static geometry. In my little demo I’ve combined the usage of Realtime GI, PBS, Reflection Probes and Light Probes, the majority of the objects marked as static apart from a few props which demonstrate the usage of Light Probes for non-static objects:

Couple of shout outs, I’ve used the Medieval Assets Pack by Naresh and the Medieval Boat from Mr Necturus which are available on the Asset Store for most of the props. The wooden cottage model center piece is a free model from some site I can’t remember.

Here’s a Vine I recently sent out, little outdated comparing to the above screenshots, but demonstrates the realtime GI in editor with play mode on:

There’s more of this to learn as Unity 5 develops through the beta stage. Note: Screenshots from beta version of Unity 5 – May look different when released.

Everyone has their own workflow and choice of Scripting IDE, but if you’re one of those using MonoDevelop with Unity this blog post should help with an increase in efficiency when working with it..

I’m using a Mac and so the workflow improvements will be based on using MonoDevelop on a Mac.

Syntax Highlighting is important for writing and reading code, MonoDevelop makes it easy to change this, simply click on MonoDevelop-Unity menu item and then click Preferences, the Preferences window will open, there’s a menu on the left hand side, under Text Editor -> Select Syntax Highlighting there will appear eight options for you to chose from. My preference is called Oblivion but pick and test one for yourself which suits you best. You can also enable semantic highlighting which helps with reading code. Use cmd + / – to zoom in and out, so you can see the code you are writing.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Who doesn’t like a good keyboard shortcut, yes there’s many to remember from many different software packages we use, but I think it’s important to have a few for each package that are your most important to your workflow. So here’s a few I feel worth highlighting for an increased workflow:

cmd + return / enter = This starts debugging mode from the Run menu item, no need to go through menu items

cmd + \ = Toggles breakpoint, no need to go through the Run menu item

cmd + shift + I = Step Into, no need to go through the Run menu item

cmd + shift + O = Step Over

cmd + shift + U = Step Out

Other useful actions, “Attach to Process” and “Detach” when debugging Unity, these don’t have any default keyboard shortcuts, but if you enter MonoDevelop-Unity menu item and reopen Preferences window, you can add your own under “Key Bindings”. This also shows everything I just highlighted and more.

New users to Unity tend to ask about an integrated support for localization within the editor (built-in tools), currently Unity does not have this, so users ask for solutions and what’s available to get this setup. I found a free package on the asset store titled Language Manager – which is a key based system and easy to integrate multiple language support for your games and apps. Let’s take a deeper look into the package and highlight the ease of use in getting it setup:

Getting Started:

Create an AssetStore Account if you haven’t got a UDN account setup already

Download and import the asset package into a new project – Best to test it out before directly importing into your current professional project

Within your new Unity project, you will see a folder named “LanguageManager” in the project window. The folder contains the scripts and resources needed to add localisation support to your game or app, included support already for 6 different languages. We shall take a quick look at the sample scene included.

Double click the sample scene to open – click the main camera in the hierarchy window and notice the script component named: TestScript.

The script contains:

A GUI Selection Grid, allowing the user to press a GUI button to switch languages

A public string which gives the option to select the default language in the inspector

A Switch statement containing support for all 6 languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Russian)

Hit play and observe the two GUI sentences at the top left of the game view are rendered in your chosen default language, the GUI buttons below allows the user to switch to a different language, clicking Russian will update the text to be displayed in Russian characters as well as for the GUI buttons. This example scene can be adapted to be used as a Language menu screen at the beginning of your game / app or in the main menu screen

It’s also worth mentioning you can get the system / OS language from an API call Application.systemLanguage – this returns the users OS default language, works on Mobile devices as well as PC, Mac and other major platforms, some are not supported so ensure to test that out. Example code for this in C# of course:

Back to the LanguageManager package,. There is a custom Window included in the Unity Window drop down menu -> Language Editor, this allows the user to create new keys and create files for different languages (I imagine as many you like). The package contains support for an initializer – LanguageManager.LoadLanguageFile(defaultLanguage); and use it by calling – LanguageManager.GetText(“string key”); That’s where you relate your key’s added in the Language Editor window, for example the string key for English language is “english”. 🙂 – with just a few lines of code you can get basic support for multiple languages within your games / apps and apply them to GUI elements in your scene/s.

Take a look at the package, it’s a free download after all, also checkout the many other packages on the Asset Store here.

I’m getting straight to the point here, what is in included in Unity5:

Physically-based Shading:

There’s a new shader to setup great looking materials in a range of lighting environments, it’s one shader to rule them all, an uber-shader one might call it, you can use it for a range of different surfaces such as wood, metal, plastics, ceramics, cloth and many others.

Realtime Global Illumination:

Built upon Geomerics Enlighten Technology, Unity5 has integrated realtime physically-based Global Illumination for cross-platform, runs super nice on mobile / tablet devices. You can animate lights, setup beautiful environments lighting and make use of emissive materials to create stunning effects and visuals. What’s really nice, as an added bonus, you now don’t need to be rebaking any lightmaps, which is especially painful when bake times are long for larger scenes, Global Illumination updates immediately upon making any changes to help dramatically increase iterative times.

WebGL:

The plugin-less browser technology is approaching fast and Unity5 will offer the option to deploy to WebGL without the need for a plugin download to playback content, with a one-click deploy system the building times are super fast and simular to what our WebPlayer plugin build system is like.

Audio Mixer:

New audio mixng technology enters Unity5 with simple workflows for setting up different sounds within your 2d / 3d games. Setup realtime mixing graphs, ability to edit tweak in play mode, create and blend between snapshots, insert effects into the mixers, implement ducking of sounds and many more..

UnityCloud:

This service offers the ability to integrate cross-promotion campaigns for acquiring players and help with retaining them

64-bit Editor:

64-bit editor brings massive improvements to Unity for handling demanding tasks 32-bit version might just crash on with out of memory, the runtime was ported a while back now, but getting the editor ported with all the dependencies took time.

PhysX 3.3:

The much requested update to PhysX has arrived, NVIDIA completely rewrote the system, bringing excellent performance boosts which is great for mobile / tablet devices. A new wheel collider is available amongst other things, more PhysX 3.3 features will be exposed later in the 5.x cycle.

There’s many more features in Unity5 which will just populate my blog, but here is more smaller but equally juicy feature set:

AI: NavMesh supports LoadLevelAdditive.

NavMeshObstacle supports two basic shapes – cylinder and box for both carving and avoidance.

Editor: The editor is now a 64-bit application.

Graphics: Improved ambient lighting.

Cubemaps support texture compression

Improved LODGroup. A “fade mode” can be set on each level and a value of “how current LOD be blended/faded to the next LOD” will be passed to shader program in unity_Scale.z.